Out of the profusion of statistics that support this fact, the most telling may be that math performance by American high school graduates is roughly the same as most high school dropouts in other countries.
My newest study in the journal Science Advances uncovers another possible reason for what Quartz has called America’s “spectacularly bad” arithmetic skills: It’s math anxiety.
To be more specific, my research shows that math anxiety leads to math avoidance. And, as anyone who has played an instrument, participated in athletics, or tried to master any nature of new task can tell you, failure to practice, or to spend time working on getting better at a thing, tends to produce less-than-stellar results when it comes to developing any type of skill.